.CX/u^, 


TWENTY-FIVE  YEARS 


IN 


OLD  WARWICK. 


AN    ADDRESS 


DBLIVERED'  ON 


Memorial    Day,    August    i8,    1904, 


I.\  WARWICK,  MASS, 


REV    A.  D.  MAYO,  A.  M.,  LL.  D. 


crrv  OF  Washington. 

K.   BERKSFORD,  PRINTER,  6l8   F  STREET,  N.  \V, 
1905. 


TWENTY-FIVE  YEARS 


IN 


OLD  WARWICK. 


AN    ADDRESS 


DELIVERED  ON 


Memorial    Day,    August    i8,    19O4, 


IN  WARWICK,  MASS., 


REV.  A.  D.  MAYO,  A.  M.,  LL.  D. 


CITY  OF   WASHINGTON. 

R.  BERESFORD,  PRINTER,  6l8  F  STREE1\  N.  \V. 

1905- 


TWENT^■-FI\'E  YEARS  IN  OLD  WARWICK. 


An  Address  Delivered  on  Memorial  Day, 

August  i8,  1904,  in  Warwick,  Mass.,  by 

Rev.  a.  D.  Mayo,  A.  M.,  LL.  D. 


Some  four  years  ago  I  was  hoping  that  my  annual  visit 
to  Warwick  might  be  renewed,  but  a  doubtless  good  Provi- 
dence was  otherwise  disposed.  Beginning  with  early  au- 
tumn, the  remainder  of  the  year,  round  to  the  summer,  was 
passed  in  what  the  doctors  made  up  their  minds  was  a  final 
fight  for  life ;  in  which  the  weight  of  professional  opinion  was, 
as  now  and  then  happens,  delivered  on  the  wrong  side.  For 
while,  I  suppose,  the  majority  of  my  non-professional  friends 
were  waiting  for  my  exit,  I,  "  being  still  of  sound  mind," 
reverted  to  the  old  days  and,  quite  naturally,  to  the  old 
Warwick  habit  of  "  toughing  it  out"  till  even  a  greater  age 
than  my  own.  I  remembered  that  my  good  little  mother, 
who  never  pulled  the  steelyards  at  100  pounds,  but  went 
through  a  greater  amount  of  hard  work  to  the  square  yard 
than  any  of  her  sex  I  recall,  stepped  out  at  the  age  of  89 — 
by  accident.  Her  mother,  the  "Aunt  Beulah"  of  old  War- 
wick, did  better  still ;  as  the  "  accident"  that  carried  her  off 
was  postponed  till  98.  Then,  great  grandmother  "Susannah" 
held  on  till  96.  jNIy  two  grandfathers  served  this  world 
bravely  and  well  till  the  respective  ages  of  8^  and  85  ;  one 
of  them,  at  his  death,  having  served  his  country  as  post- 
master for  more  than  fifty  years.  The  crown  of  this  human 
structure  was  my  great  grandfather,  the  longest  lived  of  a 
family  of  venerable  brethren,  who,  at  96,  sold  his  farm  in  the 
valley  of  the  Connecticut  and  moved  "West,"  then  St.  Law- 
rence Co.,  New  York,  to  "grow  up  with  the  country,"  and 


grew  until,  at  lOO,  he  voted  for  grandfather  Harrison  as 
President ;  and  died  at  loi  of  a  cold  caught  in  walking  at 
the  head  of  a  procession  to  celebrate  the  new  President's 
inauguration.  Had  he  not  taken  that  cold  he  might  have 
been  one  of  President  Ben.  Harrison's  postmasters,  forty 
years  later. 

Then  my  memory  served  me  with  some  of  the  facts  in  the 
history  of  Warwick  ;  that  in  1854,  with  a  population  of  1,000, 
there  were  fifty-nine  people  in  the  old  town  over  70  years  of 
age  ;  eleven  above  80  and  two  past  90.  Later,  in  1872,  when 
the  population  of  the  town  had  shrunk  to  800,  there  were 
four  over  90,  fifteen  past  80  and  twenty-seven  beyond  70. 
Then  I  further  remembered  that  Dr.  Holland,  in  his  "His- 
tory of  Western  Massachusetts,"  reports  that  Warwick,  with 
one  of  the  roughest  winter  climates  in  the  State,  was  cele- 
brated above  all  other  of  its  350  towns  for  its  number  of 
extremely  old  people.  By  that  time  you  may  "  guess"  that, 
in  the  language  of  the  prayer-book,  I  was  "  both  afraid  and 
ashamed"  to  "go  back"  on  my  own  forebears  and  the  dear 
old  town.  So  I  "  braced  up"  and — here  I  am  ;  and  I  advise 
all  you,  boys  and  girls,  to  select  as  long-lived  a  generation 
as  my  own  ;  so  that  when  not  only  "  heart  and  flesh  fail," 
but  doctors  agree  to  your  dismissal,  you  may  fall  back  on 
your  native  highlands  and  continue  until  Providence,  in 
whose  hands  we  all  abide  forever,  invites  you  to  migrate 
and  "  grow  up  with  the  country"  in  some  future  kingdom 
of  Heaven. 

But  now  that  I  am  once  more  here,  let  me  thank  you  for 
the  kindness  with  which  you  have  remembered  the  sick 
young  man  that,  at  the  age  of  23,  away  back  in  the  40's, 
finally  left  his  Warwick  home  for  the  life  that  has  carried 
him  through  every  portion  of  our  own  country  save  the 
Pacific  Coast  and  the  new  colonial  possessions  half  round 
the  world.  And  never  has  a  week  passed  in  that  more 
than  half  century  that  the  life  of  my  childhood,  youth  and 
early  manhood  has  not  enveloped  me,  as  in  a  far-off  world 


of  delightful  recollections ;  never  more  vivid  and  enchant- 
ing than  when,  a  month  ago,  I  made  np  my  mind  that  not 
only  pleasure  but  duty  called  me  back  to  your  yearly 
festival. 

Any  stranger  can  easily  learn  a  good  deal  of  that  period 
of  which  I  speak  today,  from  1823  to  1848,  when  Warwick 
was  certainly  at  its  best  estate,  according  to  the  time-hon- 
ored idea  of  a  successful  New  England  town.  There  were 
then  1 150  people  ;  the  majority  of  the  leading  families  direct 
descendants  of  the  settlers,  chiefly  from  what  is  now  "  the 
Greater  Boston,"  who,  eighty  years  before,  laid  out  a  road 
from  Roxbury  75  miles  into  the  Wilderness  of  "Gardner's 
Roxbury  Canada ;"  fifteen  years  later  rechristened  Warwick  ; 
as  good  "  Squire  Blake"  fancies,  "  in  memory  of  the  famous 
Guy,  Earl  of  Warwick,"  in  the  old  home  across  the  sea. 
Probably  at  no  time  was  the  land  so  productive  or  well 
tilled  as  then.  The  furore  for  shaving  the  town  clean  of  it's 
grand  old  forests  of  beach,  chestnut  and  pine  was  then  only 
apparent  in  the  fifteen  saw  mills  that  "  turned  out"  for  the 
neighboring  towns  a  million  feet  of  lumber  every  year. 
The  people  still  all  gathered  on  Sunday  in  the  old  meeting 
house  upon  the  common,  although  "  other  denominations" 
were  not  taxed  for  the  support  of  any  save  their  own  public 
worship.  The  ten  district  schools  were  in  full  blast.  In  short ; 
the  twenty-five  years  in  old  Warwick,  of  which  I  speak, 
cover  the  period  when  the  town  was  one  of  the  best  illustra- 
tions of  country  life  in  the  New  England  of  seventy  years  ago. 
How  it  looked  from  the  windows  of  the  parson's  house  is  , 
told  in  the  two  charmingr  vohimes  of  ]\Irs.  Favctte  Smith, 
familiar  to  you.  But  it  is  the  blessedness  of  our  human  lot 
that  every  living  man  and  woman  becomes  a  poet  and  an 
artist  with  the  retreating  years  from  childhood.  Each  of 
the  two  or  three  hundred  "  children  and  youth"  that  came 
up  with  myself,  if  spared  long  enough,  had  a  separate  pic- 
ture of  life  in  old  Warwick,  beautiful  in  spite  of  whatever 
hardships,  toils  or  trials  may  have  been  the  environment. 


But  I  am  not  here  today  to  inflict  upon  you  my  own 
picture  of  the  first  third  of  my  life  in  old  Warwick,  begin- 
ning in  1823,  when  the  incorporated  town  was  about  sixty 
years  old.  I  propose  to  attempt  a  more  useful  and,  I  hope, 
interesting  theme — to  try  to  ascertain  from  my  own  expe- 
rience and  observation  what  were  the  elements  of  society 
and  the  circumstances  that  made  what  we  fondly  call  "  old 
Warwick"  one  of  the  model  towns  of  New  England,  and  what 
made  the  New  England  town  of  seventy  years  ago,  accord- 
ing to  the  historians,  the  most  notable  university  for  the 
citizenship  of  a  world's  republic  in  ancient  or  modern  days. 
And  then,  with  full  recognition  of  the  past  and  all  the  pre- 
cious legacies  it  has  bequeathed  to  us,  I  would  enter  my 
protest  against  the  academic  pessimism  that,  through  speech 
and  song  and  story  and  editorial  comment,  bewails  the 
present  breaking  up  of  that  order  of  affairs ;  with  blatant 
prediction  of  a  hundred  varieties  of  local,  municipal,  State 
and  national  ruin  in  the  nearby  future.  A  distinguished 
Doctor  of  Divinity  in  the  flourishing  new  city  of  Atlanta, 
Ga.,  on  learning  that  I  hailed  from  Boston,  replied  :  "  Well, 
I  suppose  your  old  town  is  about  done  growing."  Another 
statesman,  now  out  of  politics,  addressed  3,000  people  in 
Tremont  Temple  on  "  The  Financial  Decay  of  IMassachu- 
setts."  The  trouble  with  the  learned  doctor  was  that  he 
thought,  because  his  own  city  was  growing,  every  town  a 
hundred  years  old  must  be  on  the  decline.  The  statesman's 
difficulty,  as  I  found  afterwards,  was  his  own  inability  to 
pay  his  debts  at  home.  The  same  delusion  appeared,  as  I 
remember,  in  a  meeting  of  "  us  boys,"  held  on  the  hay- 
mow of  my  grandfather's  barn,  to  decide  on  the  celebration 
of  Independence  Day,  by  a  ball.  The  "  society  leader'' 
among  us  was  stricken  with  an  unaccountable  indifference, 
which,  after  a  good  deal  of  pumping,  came  out  in  the  de- 
spairing tone  :  "Why,  all  the  girls  have  gone  to  Boston"; 
whereupon  somebody  piped  up :  "  It's  only  your  girl  that's 
gone  to  Boston.     Why  don't  you  take  the  stage  and  dance 


with  her  down  there  ?"  It  is  our  human  misfortune  that, 
when  our  personal  heydey  is  waning,  we  can  hardly  believe 
it  is  sunrise  anywhere  else.  So,  if  I  succeed,  I  hope  to  leave 
such  of  you  as  lived  in  or  near  the  old  times  not  in  despair 
of  the  Warwick  which  is  today  ;  but  with  a  well-founded 
hope  of  what  may  be  in  store  for  it  in  the  next  half  cen- 
tury. I  shall  never  forget  that,  between  the  ages  of  ten  and 
fifteen,  I  never  went  to  sleep  on  the  little  front  seat  in  the 
"  Center  School  House"  at  the  Lyceum  when  grand  old 
Squire  Jonathan  Blake  put  on  his  glasses  and,  whether  in 
verse  or  prose,  wherever  he  began,  loomed  up  as  the  Town 
Prophet.  When  there  were  not  a  hundred  miles  of  railroad 
in  [Massachusetts  he  predicted  all  the  glories  of  the  limited 
express  from  ocean  to  ocean,  with  glimpses  of  other  things 
yet  undiscovered.  Still  the  summit  of  his  prophecy  was 
^'  not  in  sight"  of  the  magnificent  revelations  of  even  the 
past  fifty  years.  Each  of  you,  boys  and  girls,  now  lives 
under  a  new  heaven,  on  a  new  earth,  from  the  realm  in  which 
I  lived  in  my  first  twenty-five  years.  Each  of  you  is  doing  or 
reading  about  and  perfectly  at  home  with  a  dozen  things  that 
my  grandfathers  could  no  more  accomplish  than  work  one 
of  the  miracles  of  the  New  Testament.  So  I,  at  the  close 
of  my  familiar  talk  today,  would  send  you  home  with  your 
"heads  swimming"  with  hope  of  the  possibilities  of  the 
New  Massachusetts,  already  in  sight ;  even  as  we  used  to 
go  home  from  the  Lyceum  at  the  ringing  of  the  nine-o'clock 
bell,  after  we  had  one  on  the  new  church,  to  dream  of  the 
future,  determined  to  launch  out  and  "  go  where  glory 
waited." 

So  let  me  now,  as  briefly  as  the  importance  of  the  subject 
Avill  warrant,  try  to  set  forth  some  of  the  elements  which 
made  for  the  success  of  the  better  order  of  New  England 
towns  seventy  years  ago.  I  say  "the  better  order";  be- 
cause there  were  then  "mean  towns"  as  well  as  "mean 
people"  in  ever\'  town;   I  fancy,  in  at  least  as  large  propor- 


8 

tion  and  often  with  a  greater  opportunity  for  mischief 
making  than  among  their  descendants  of  today. 

First,  and  largely,  we  must  consider  the  original  popula- 
tion of  the  six  miles  square,  now  partly  Warwick  and 
Orange  ;  the  large  majority,  however,  left  in  Warwick  at 
the  division  of  territory.  This  population  originally  con- 
sisted of  some  sixty  proprietors,  who  by  act  of  the  "  Great 
and  General  Court,"  of  Massachusetts,  in  the  year  1735, 
made  this  one  of  four  townships,  each  of  six  miles  square, 
to  be  assigned  in  sixty-three  equal  shares  "  one  for  the  first 
settled  minister,  one  for  the  use  of  the  ministry  and  one  for 
the  schools ;"  the  sixty  remaining  to  be  given  to  the  peti- 
tioners and  "such  as  were  the  descendents  of  the  officers 
and  soldiers  who  served  in  the  expedition  to  Canada  in  the 
year  1690."  In  1738  a  portion  of  this  group  appeared  and 
were  given  possession,  each  of  a  fifty-acre  home-lot.  From 
this  date  until  1763,  for  twenty-eight  years,  the  settlement 
grew  under  the  name  of  "  Gardner's  Roxbury  Canada,"  by 
three  separate  distributions  of  land,  'till  its  incorporation  by 
the  General  Court,  by  the  name  of  Warwick.  The  entire 
original  territory  included  nearly  25,000  acres  of  land,  and 
was  divided  largely  according  to  the  quality,  the  poorer 
the  land  the  larger  the  farm.  Each  of  the  original  propri- 
etors was  taxed  an  equivalent  of  probably  $10.00  to  defray 
expenses  ;  and,  as  the  division  went  on,  the  tax  increased. 
Indeed,  it  is  probable  that  each  of  the  first  sixty  proprietors 
was  assessed  a  sum  from  $30.00  to  $50.00,  equivalent  to  a 
much  larger  sum  at  present,  to  encourage  the  first  ten  who 
found  out  "  the  nearest  route  from  Roxbury"  to  this  new 
tract  of  country.  Ten  years  later,  the  bounty  was  increased 
to  ^20  to  each  individual,  and  later  to  ;^30. 

Now  here  was  a  principle  of  selection  of  good  omen  for 
the  beginning  of  the  settlement.  These  people,  many  of 
them  descendants  of  soldiers,  were  evidently  more  than  a 
fair  representative  of  what  is  now  the  Greater  Boston,  in- 
cluding a  good   proportion   of  families  honorably  distin- 


guished  for  service  at  home.  They  were  able  to  offer  what 
was  then  a  generous  bounty  for  real  settlers.  There  was 
no  such  rush  as  we  now  read  of  at  the  settlement  of  a  new 
State  to  pre-empt  a  quarter-section  of  Uncle  Sam's  out- 
door lot.  It  was  known  who  came.  The  fact  that  the 
three  first  lots  were  assigned  for  the  church,  the  ministry 
and  the  schools,  declares  the  opinion  of  the  settlers  in  re- 
gard to  the  corner  stone  of  their  little  commonwealth  in  the 
far-off  woods. 

The  coming  War  of  Independence,  some  ten  years  after 
the  incorporation  of  the  town,  found  these  people  so  thor- 
oughly alive  to  the  situation  that  they  even  overcame  their 
habitual  reverence  for  the  clergy,  and  w^ere  only  prevented 
from  "  dismissing,  disarming  and  confining"  their  first 
minister  on  suspicion  of  Toryism,  on  his  pledge,  "upon 
honor,  not  to  influence  or  prejudice  the  minds  of  the  people 
against  the  common  cause."  Their  behavior  through  the 
whole  period  of  the  war ;  their  instructions  to  the  first  dele- 
gate sent  to  the  Colonial  Convention ;  their  deliberate  con- 
sultation at  the  various  steps  that  led  to  the  organization  of 
the  new  State ;  the  character  of  the  men  they  sent  to  the 
Legislature  and  elected  to  the  various  town  and  county 
offices ;  all  speak  well  of  the  towai.  As  we  go  on  in  the  analy- 
sis of  society,  as  I  remember  it,  through  the  twenty-five 
most  prosperous  years  of  the  town,  we  shall  meet  at  every 
step  with  the  assurance  that  these  people  who  first  built  the 
road  through  the  boundless  forest  in  sight  of  Mount  Grace, 
then  opened  the  pathway  through  the  woods  to  their  nearest 
neighbors,  and  for  the  first  fifty  years  toiled  with  heart  and 
brain  and  hands  to  get  the  new  settlement  "  out  of  the 
woods"  "  meant  business,"  and  went  about  their  "  job"  with 
a  deliberate  wisdom,  a  courage  and  a  patience  that  account 
for  what  I  found  at  my  earliest  recollection  concerning  the 
people  among  whom  I  was  born  and  to  whom  I  owe  the 
best  of  what  I  am  and  have  been  able  to  do  in  life. 

During  these  more  than  fift>-  years  of  my  absence  from 


10 

my  native  town,  though  no  "  globe  trotter,"  I  have  been 
called  practically  to  spend  about  an  equal  division  of  time 
in  my  own  country  in  each  of  its  continental  divisions  save 
the  Western  mountain  region  and  Pacific  coast — in  New 
England,  the  old  Middle,  the  original  Western  and  all  the 
Southern  States.  I  am  confident  I  have  never  known  a 
population  of  i,ooo  people  in  one  community  that  contained 
within  itself  the  elements  of  more  valuable  service  to  the 
Republic  than  the  old  Warwick  of  my  day.  During  the  past 
seventy-five  years  it  has  sent  forth  perhaps  as  large  a  number 
of  able  men  for  leadership  in  the  industrial  and  all  the  pro- 
fessional departments  of  American  life,  with  '*  noble  women 
not  a  few,"  as  any  similar  community  in  any  portion  of  the 
country.  My  last  letter  from  the  late  Bishop  Frederic  Dan 
Huntington,  for  two  terms  in  his  early  manhood  a  Warwick 
schoolmaster,  contains  a  most  discriminating,  appreciative 
and  affectionate  remembrance  of  the  leading  families  of  the 
town  in  that  period.  As  before  said,  here  was  a  "  fair  start" 
for  Warwick  in  its  first  hundred  years  of  life  as  one  of  the 
350  and  more  towns  of  the  Commonwealth  of  Massachu- 
setts. It  does  not  follow  that  the  mere  organization  of  a 
New  England  township  was  responsible  for  its  power  and 
influence  ;  so  great  that  Thomas  Jefferson,  among  the  good 
things  he  couldn't  do,  seriously  proposed  to  cut  up  old  Vir- 
ginia in  imitation  of  its  rival,  Massachusetts,  into  the  towns 
that  came  nearer  realizing  the  original  Virginia  ideal  of 
"  State  rights"  than  any  southern  commonwealth  ever 
succeeded  in  translating  that  theory  to  an  accomplished 
fact.  There  were  plenty  of  towns  then  in  Massachusetts 
that  did  not  succeed  in  this  way.  Indeed,  there  were  several 
that,  in  the  expressive  language  of  the  day,  were  baptized 
"  Hell  Town,"  and  required  several  "  revivals  of  religion" 
to  get  them  in  sight  of  the  golden  gates.  But  there  has 
yet  been  found  no  recipe  for  making  a  good  town,  state  or 
nation  of  a  people  in  that  condition  of  ignorance,  supersti- 
tion, shiftlessness,  vulgarity  and  vice  known  by  the  diction- 


11 

ary  name,  "  Illiteracy."  It  was  because  Warwick  was  from 
the  first  what  it  has  been  all  through — a  "  chosen  people ;" 
that  we,  her  children,  today  feel  ourselves  honored  as  we 
recount  and  recall  her  "days  of  old." 

2d.  From  such  an  origin,  it  is  not  difficult  to  understand 
how  the  foundations  of  the  new  town  were  laid  in  its  family 
life.  The  Puritan  folk  of  New  England  "had  no  use"  for 
an  unmarried  man  or  woman  ;  and  the  cruel  stigma  of  "  old 
maid"  for  generations  had  inflicted  a  chronic  slander  on  the 
fair  name  and  fame  of  this  class,  until  Theodore  Parker 
came  to  the  rescue,  in  his  triumphant  eulogy  on  "  The 
Glorious  Old  Maids  of  Massachusetts."  The  early  settlers 
of  Warwick  probably  did  not  include  a  large  contingent  of 
"  old  bachelors,"  as  the  additional  persuasive  to  early  mar- 
riage was  offered  by  the  gift  of  a  farm  to  each  family.  A 
fundamental  idea  concerning  the  old-time  New  England 
family  was  that  marriage  was  no  sentimental  arrangement 
of  the  "oak  and  ivy"  persuasion,  but  was  a  manly  and 
womanly  partnership  for  life  ;  first  to  love  God  and  each 
other,  and  then,  "  till  death  us  do  part,"  to  "  work  together 
for  good."  This  law  of  service  had  no  exceptions.  Of 
course,  there  was  the  usual  half-conscious  arrangement  of  a 
mild  class  distinction  in  the  society  of  the  place  ;  possibly 
a  dozen  of  the  sixty  families  by  common  consent  being 
"  looked  up  to"  and  relied  on  for  social  and  other  sorts  of 
leadership.  But  the  one  thing  that  has  always  separated 
vitally  any  genuine  upper  class  in  New  England  society 
from  every  historical  aristocracy  of  the  old  or  its  modern 
imitation  in  the  new  world,  was  spoken  "  once  for  all"  in 
Palestine,  when  the  Master  said  :  "  Let  him  who  is  greatest 
among  you  be  your  servant."  "On  this  rock"  is  builded 
the  entire  structure  of  modern  Christian,  as  opposed  to 
every  form  of  a  selfish  paganized,  order  of  society.  This 
group  of  superior  families,  as  I  knew  them  in  my  youth, 
was  represented  by  perhaps  fifty  of  the  hardest-working  men 
and  women  in  the  comuumity,  whose  names  appear  when- 


12 

ever  the  people  are  called  to  elect  anybody  for  any  important 
service.  Their  superiority  was  not  gauged  by  money ; 
indeed  it  is  doubtful  if  any  man  in  town  in  my  day  was 
"  worth  40,000  dollars" — why  they  didn't  make  it  $50,000 
was  one  of  the  puzzles  of  my  boyhood.  While  com- 
fortable living  was  the  rule,  and  perhaps  a  score  of  the 
houses  were  larger  if  not  better  than  others,  there  was  no 
luxurious  life.  I  have  no  recollection  that  any  Warwick  fam- 
ily in  the  twenty-five  years  named  had  a  permanent  servant. 
Every  mother,  not  an  invalid,  was  her  own  housekeeper 
and  the  girls  were  trained  for  the  same  office;  with  few 
exceptions  a  type  of  housekeeping  which  has  passed  into 
history  and  literature,  and,  as  far  as  the  "  pies"  are  con- 
cerned, deserves  commemoration  in  poetry.  A  few  daugh- 
ters of  the  poorer  families  were  available  for  occasional 
"  help ;"  always  expecting  to  "  sit  at  the  table"  with  the 
family,  especially  "when  it  had  company."  V\/e  had  the 
usual  dressmaker  and  the  "  tailoress,"  dear  jolly  "Aunt 
Experience,"  who  carried  every  man's  "  measure"  in  her 
capacious  memory,  and  taught  me  to  fold  my  first  "tailcoat" 
so  thoroughly  that  I  always  remember  her  on  that  occasion. 
Her  reign  was  only  disturbed  by  the  irruption  of  a  "  gen- 
tleman tailor  from  Ireland,"  whose  term  of  service  came  to 
a  sudden  end  in  a  street  fight  with  a  crowd  of  the  saucy 
boys  of  the  town.  The  general  philanthropic  work,  now  in 
the  hands  of  two  or  three  societies  and  churches,  was  con- 
centrated in  grand  old  Aunt  Annie,  who  knew  by  instinct 
where  she  was  wanted — in  her  own  words,  "had  missed  in 
every  family  in  town" — and  probably  died  in  honorable 
maidenhood  because  she  loved  every  man  in  town  so  dearly 
she  couldn't  break  the  hearts  of  all  the  rest  by  marrying 
any  one ;  and  as  for  the  children !  the  famous  picture  of 
Germany,  by  Kaulbach,  a  glorious  German  woman  with 
children  hanging  all  about  her,  was  a  correct  portrait  of 
Warwick's  good  Aunt  Annie. 

The  New  England  women  for  two  hundred  years  from 


13 

Plymouth  Rock,  as  a  body  the  most  intelligent,  effective 
and  every  way  worthy  of  their  sex  then  in  Christendom, 
were  the  only  body  so  numerous  that  with  occasional  ex- 
ceptions had  no  servant  class  in  the  household.  Rough 
labor  in  the  European  field  and  on  the  old  American  planta- 
tion changes  woman  to  a  beast  of  burden,  in  some  ways 
stronger  and  more  effective  than  man.  But  such  w^ork  as 
was  given  to  the  women  of  New  England  for  two  hundred 
years,  accompanied  by  the  upper-story  service  in  the  family 
and  society,  was  too  much  even  for  the  powerful  physical 
constitution  brought  from  England.  In  my  youth  the  crisis 
came  with  such  a  general  breakdown  of  the  health  of  young 
women  as  might  have  wrought  a  social  disaster  had  not  a 
good  Providence  sent  us  Bridget  from  the  Green  Island  and 
labor-saving  machinery  in  the  home,  fifty  years  of  which 
has  brought  to  the  native-born  New  England  women  the 
marvelous  reversion  to  health  and  supreme  activity  we  now 
behold. 

A  great  help  to  happy  marriage  was  the  good  old  New 
England  function  of  "courting."  Courting  was  a  serious 
business,  especially  to  the  young  woman  partner.  My 
father  used  to  tell  how  on  one  occasion,  having  started  in 
his  best  rig  on  a  week-day  evening  to  visit  his  "  Sophronia," 
he  was  met  by  his  father  with  the  order  :  "  Go  home,  boy. 
None  of  that  till  Sunday  night."  So,  after  the  best  girl 
had  spent  the  busiest  kind  of  a  Sunday  morning  and  after- 
noon at  church  service,  probably  singing  in  the  choir,  with 
five-o'clock  singing  school,  including  the  Sunday  dinner, 
and  then  had  faced  her  destiny  by  "sitting  up"  with  her 
admirer  from  "early  candle  lighting"  to  the  small  hours, 
leaving  only  a  brief  hour  for  sleeping  before  up  at  daylight 
to  wrestle  the  terrors  of  Monday  washing  day,  and  had 
"  stuck  to  that"  for  one,  possibly  two  or  three  years,  if  she 
didn't  know  her  man  she  had  only  herself  to  blame.  I  have 
no  recollection  of  a  divorce,  and  not  half  a  dozen  family 
separations,  and  those  only  for  extreme  cause,  with  hardly 


14 

a  sexual  scandal,  in  the  twenty-five  years  of  my  residence 
in  Warwick.  There  were  notable  cases  of  a  good  woman  who 
held  on  to  a  drunken  husband  year  by  year,  until  she 
finally  pulled  him  into  the  church,  where  he  died,  certainly 
free  from  the  odor  of  New  England  rum,  if  without  "  the 
odor  of  sanctity."  And  out  of  several  of  these  families  came 
a  set  of  boys,  sent  forth  by  their  brave  mothers  to  earn  dis- 
tinction. 

While  doubtless  all  these  people,  save  a  few  store  and 
tavern  loungers,  did  work  too  hard,  yet  that  tireless  in- 
dustry and  careful  economy  of  two  hundred  years  was  the 
foundation  of  the  industrial  superiority  of  New  England 
today,  which  will  endure  as  long  as  the  corner-stone  on 
which  it  was  builded  is  not  broken.  But  here  the  economy 
of  New  England  meant  saving  on  the  lower  side  to  invest  in 
the  upper  side  of  life.  The  mone}'  saved,  often  by  bodily 
hardship,  was  used  to  build  the  church  and  the  school,  send 
the  boy  to  college,  always  invested  at  the  top  of  life,  verify- 
ing the  divine  precept :  "All  things  shall  be  added  unto"  a 
man  or  state  that  "  first  seeks  the  kingdom  of  God  and  His 
righteousness."  My  own  first  twenty-five  dollars  that  sent 
me  to  college  at  twenty  was  obtained  by  the  present  of  an 
empty  powder  flask  or  can  by  my  father,  with  a  hole  in  the 
top,  through  which  anything  from  a  cent  to  a  ninepence 
could  be  dropped,  but  out  of  which  nothing  could  be  rescued 
until  it  was  filled. 

Of  course,  in  every  form  of  society  as  intense  as  that  de- 
scribed a  good  deal  must  be  allowed  for  an  omnipotent, 
omnicient  and  omnipresent  social  public  opinion,  which 
made  every  man,  woman  and  child  a  sort  of  detective  police 
in  regard  to  everybody's  business.  The  "  after  clap"  of  this 
was  seen  when  the  boys  began  to  leave  us  for  Boston,  Cin- 
cinnati and  New  Orleans,  seventy  years  ago  the  three 
lighthouses  that  shot  their  rays  from  afar  to  allure  every 
ambitious  youth.  Then,  of  course,  came  the  usual  break- 
ing loose  of  the  boy  who  could   do  only  one  disreputable 


15 

thing  at  home,  "get  drunk."  And  there  were  enough 
domestic  tragedies  of  good  girls,  carried  off  their  feet  to 
marry  worthless  young  men  from  the  cities,  to  set  up  two 
or  three  successors  to  the  late  Miss  Mary  E.  Wilkins.  Still, 
the  morale  of  the  town  followed  the  large  majority  who 
went  forth  to  make  a  record  of  which  any  community  might 
well  be  proud.  Some  of  you,  bright  school  boys  or  girls, 
could  do  no  better  than  look  up  the  names  of  the  young 
folk  who  for  the  last  seventy  years  have  left  Warwick  to 
become  worthy  and  often  distinguished  citizens  of  the  Re- 
public in  almost  every  honorable  position  in  life. 

The  industry  of  the  New  England  women  and  children 
of  that  day  was  something  marvelous.  With  their  butter 
and  cheese,  their  weaving  and  spinning,  with  the  new  in- 
dustry of  braiding  palm-leaf  hats,  for  nearly  a  generation 
they  really  were  the  "  better  half  "  in  the  support  of  the 
family.  The  trade  in  the  stores  was  almost  exclusively 
"  barter"  in  the  few  articles  of  home  consumption,  leav- 
ing the  productions  of  the  farm  and  forest  to  be  utilized  for 
building  up  the  permanent  investment  of  the  family. 

During  the  ten  years  that  I  kept  my  father's  store  accounts 
I  have  no  recollection  of  any  woman  making  a  "  bad  debt." 
They  were  "  hard  customers"  to  sell  goods  to,  because  they 
knew  the  pay  for  them  would  come  out  of  their  own  flesh 
and  blood.  There  was  the  usual  number  of  "  men  folks" 
who  would  "  run  up  a  debt"  to  the  straining  point,  which 
they  probably  never  intended  to  pay.  The  popular  talk  of 
the  decline  of  honesty  in  business  in  New  England  received 
its  first  protest,  with  a  good  many  other  humbugs,  from 
Theodore  Parker,  when  he  declared  that  the  lioston  of  his 
day,  so  far  as  business  went,  in  honest)-  was  far  beyond  any 
previous  time.  Seventy  years  ago,  everywhere  in  the  United 
States,  business  meant  "  Every  man  for  himself  and  the 
devil  take  the  hindmost."  The  great  revelations  of  breach 
of  trust,  turning  corporation  screws,  and,  most  dangerous  of 
all,  denying  the  natural  right  to  work  for  a  living  to  whole 


16 

classes  of  men,  are  simply  the  logical  results  of  that  old 
style  of  trading,  beginning  with  the  boys  swapping  jack- 
knives,  and  permeating  society  from  ridge-pole  to  cellar. 
Ninety  per  cent,  of  the  men  worth  $100,000  in  New  Eng. 
land  today  began  their  lives  as  all  but  half  a  dozen  boys 
began  in  Warwick,  and  in  every  country  store  or  trading 
place  every  "  trick  of  trade"  was  practiced  by  these  young 
men  in  the  getting  of  their  fortunes.  So  in  these  latter 
days  this  habit  has  blossomed  out  into  the  gigantic  tyrannies 
of  labor  and  capital,  to  the  horror  of  the  whole  noble  army 
of  pessimists.  The  way  out  of  all  this  is  an  organization  of 
industry,  which,  in  due  time,  will  come  in  sight  of  the  other 
searchlight  of  the  gospel  :  "  Whatsoever  ye  would  that  men 
should  do  to  you,  do  ye  even  so  to  them." 

The  shadow  side  of  that  old  family  life  was,  first,  its  ter- 
rible intensity  ;  second,  its  ignorance  of  sanitary  law,  which 
located  family  diseases  that  carried  off  one  member  after 
another  with  the  regularity  of  the  executioner's  call  in  the 
Reign  of  Terror  in  Paris,  and  almost  every  autumn  after 
the  short  summer's  overwork  would  plunge  the  whole  com- 
munity into  epidemics  that  now  seem  to  have  abandoned 
the  North  and  retreated  to  the  South,  as  I  have  observed 
for  the  last  twenty  years.  There  was  also  a  great  lack  of 
wholesome  amusement.  Even  the  liberalized  religion  of 
the  new  Congregationalism  held  the  young  people  with  too 
"  taut  a  rein."  The  strain  was  relieved  at  one  end  by  the 
almost  universal  habit  of  drink  and  the  terrible  ravages  of 
drunkenness,  until  the  great  temperance  movement  came  in 
that  we  still  have  with  us.  For  the  girls,  who,  with  rare 
exceptions,  "  let  rum  alone,"  the  favorite  outlet  was  the 
half-yearly  dance,  the  occasional  excursion  or  sleigh  ride, 
the  delightful  berry-picking  and  the  mild  flavor  of  the 
"forfeit  party,"  where  universal  osculation  seemed  to  rob 
that  indulgence  of  all  its  perils. 

3d.  When  we  come  to  talk  of  society  we  can  do  little 
but  repeat  what  has  already  been  said  of  life  in  the  family ; 


17 

for  society  in  its  modern  city  significance  conld  hardly  be 
said  to  exist  in  old  Warwick.  One  half  the  year  was 
given  to  "getting  a  living"  out  of  the  stubborn  hills  and 
narrow  valleys.  As  an  old  fellow  from  the  White  Mount- 
ains expressed  it :  "  This  is  a  country  where  }'ou  have 
three  months  to  raise  things,  three  months  to  get  'em  under 
kiver,  and  six  months  to  eat  'em  up.  I'm  going  to  take 
my  boys  out  West."  The  long  winter,  really  beginning  at 
Thanksgiving  and  "  hanging  on"  till  a  bleak  Mayday,  apart 
from  the  usual  work  of  caring  for  the  cattle  and  keeping 
up  the  woodpile,  left  leisure  for  something  so  much  better 
than  society  as  now  understood  that  we  deplore  the  loss  of 
the  good  old  habits  of  "  going  a  visiting,"  tea  drinking,  and 
the  evening  neighborhood  gathering  which  left  scarcely  a 
house  in  any  permanent  loneliness — lighting  up  the  whole 
community,  as  you  sometimes  see  from  the  car  windows 
passing  through  a  wilderness  country,  a  running  fire  chang- 
ing a  bleak  mountain  side  to  a  sort  of  fairyland. 

The  soul  of  New  England  society  in  that  day  was  the 
everlasting  habit  of  talk.  A  people  so  intelligent,  intense 
and  bent  on  doing  things  in  such  a  community  had  every- 
thinof  to  talk  about.  Thev  leaned  over  the  rail  fences  and 
talked  to  each  other  in  the  fields.  The  women  talked  at 
their  housework,  and  the  clatter  of  tongues  kept  time  to 
the  rocking  of  the  cradle  and  the  braiding  of  hats.  The 
village  store  and  the  shoemaker's  shop  were,  each  in  its  way, 
a  free  university.  The  meeting-house  between  the  two 
Sunday  services  was  vocal  with  the  gossip  of  the  women  ; 
while  the  men  talked  louder,  with  coarser  gossip  on  the 
tavern  porch  and  in  the  postoffice.  Nothing  was  done 
until  it  was  "talked  into  shape."  So  far  from  avoiding 
"talking  shop,"  the  people  did  nothing  else — their  own 
life,  the  conditions  of  public  affairs  in  town,  State  and  na- 
tion ;  every  man's  business;  the  minister's  sermon  ;  "  sizing 
up"  the  new  school  mistress;  especially  the  last  engage- 
ment as  announced  by  the  publication  at  the  cliurch  by  the 


18 

minister  or  posted  up  in  the  notice  box.  Here  was  society 
in  its  essence;  the  exchange  of  opinions  by  people  dead  in 
earnest,  engaged  in  the  making  of  a  new  Republic  that  be- 
fore another  half  century  would  astonish  the  world  by  the 
greatest  revolution  of  modern  times,  leaving  the  Nation  a 
new  world's  power,  the  object  lesson  of  a  people's  nation 
to  Christendom. 

4th.  xA.long  with  these  three  foundation  stones  of  the 
new  town  in  the  wilderness  was  another  most  important 
additional  "  corner  stone";  the  Church  and  the  Christian 
Ministry,  as  originally  established  in  the  year  of  the  incor- 
poration of  the  town,  nearly  thirty  years  after  its  first  settle- 
ment, and  as  it  had  continued  for  some  eighty  years  until 
the  time  of  my  own  final  departure  from  Warwick  in  1848. 
At  that  time  the  people  had  nominally  been  living  under  a 
"  Christian  ministry,"  covering  a  term  of  nearly  eighty 
years. 

As  early  as  1754  the  little  colony,  while  the  company 
was  paying  30  pounds  bounty  for  settlers,  voted  to  build  a 
meeting  house  "  35  feet  long,  30  wide,  with  19  feet  posts,"  at 
an  expense  of  26  pounds  13  shillings  4  pence  for  the  builder, 
the  workmen  paid  four  shillings  a  day.  But,  not  being  a 
log  house,  it  was  two  years  before  it  came  to  ihe  "raising," 
probably  the  great  occasion  of  the  year,  accomplished  by 
calling  in  extra  "  hands"  from  Northfield  and  the  adjacent 
settlements.  The  Indians  were  meanwhile  engaged  in  their 
favorite  occupation  of  "  killing  and  capturing  divers  per- 
sons," and  _;^8  was  voted  to  build  a  fort  for  protection 
against  this  detachment  of  Satan's  forces  in  those  parts, 
re-enforced  by  the  wolves  and  wild  cats,  on  whose  heads  a 
heavy  price  was  set.  The  meeting  house  went  on  with  the 
saw  mill  and  the  grist  mill.  In  1760  the  first  money  was 
raised  by  the  settlement  to  defray  the  expense  of  "some 
suitable  orthodox  minister's  preaching,"  and  the  same  year 
;^i49  was  voted  for  the  settlement  and  salary  of  the  Rev. 
Lemuel  Hedge  ;  ^60  for  salary  and  £()  for  expense  of  "  or- 


19 

dination,"  which  probably  was  not  under  the  auspices  of 
the  "  W.  C  T.  U."  The  minister's  salary  was  voted  for  five 
years,  and  afterwards  arranged  on  a  sliding  scale,  to  rise  as 
the  families  increased,  thirteen  shillings  and  four  pence  for 
each  family.  One  hundred  families  would  give  a  salary  of 
;^8o  and  "  30  cords  of  wood,  cut  8  feet  long."  The  old  com- 
mon, a  tract  of  ten  acres,  was  selected  for  the  meeting- 
house site,  and  one  hundred  acres  voted  as  a  settlement  to 
the  minister  near  the  present  village.  Mr.  Hedge  accepted 
the  terms  of  settlement,  and  in  March,  1761,  the  proprietors 
of  the  town  met  in  the  new  building,  the  congregation  con- 
sisting of  the  original  2)7  families.  The  meeting-house  was 
also  the  only  Town  Hall.  A  burying  ground  was  added 
in  1766. 

The  breaking  out  of  the  War  of  Independence,  ten  years 
later,  involved  the  people  in  difficulty  with  their  minister, 
who  was  accused  of  Toryism,  and  was  only  saved  from 
being  "dismissed,  disarmed  and  confined"  by  his  promise 
"on  his  honor"  not  to  "meddle  with  politics."  A  few 
years  later  the  people  voted  to  excuse  the  Baptists  from 
taxation  for  the  support  of  the  Congregational  minister,  and 
instructed  their  first  delegate  to  the  General  Assembly  of 
the  colony  to  advocate  "  toleration  of  all  persons  on  the 
subject  of  religion  without  giving  one  the  advantage  of  the 
other."  The  war  period  was  further  disturbed  by  a  religious 
excitement,  terminating  in  the  only  religious  scandal  that 
ever  affected  the  town.  Parson  Hedge  died  during  the  con- 
tinuance of  the  war,  in  1777,  the  day  that  General  Bur- 
goyne  surrendered  in  far-off  Saratoga,  New  York,  after  a 
ministry  of  seventeen  years. 

The  people  made  haste  to  supply  themselves  with  another 
spiritual  leader  in  the  person  of  Rev.  Samuel  Reed.  He  was 
ordained  in  1779,  and  in  1794  became  also  minister  of  the 
town.  Mr.  Reed  died  in  18 12,  after  a  ministry  of  thirty- 
three  years.  There  were  various  legends  in  circulation  dur- 
ing my  boyhood  bearing  upon  the  physical  prowess  of  this 


20 

excellent  man,  against  whose  spiritual  outfit  there  seems  to 
have  been  no  protest.  But  the  good  man  was  no  worse 
fitted  for  the  work  of  the  Lord  in  old  Warwick  on  that 
account. 

In  1814  the  Rev.  Preserved  Smith,  son,  father,  grandfather 
and  probably  great  grandfather  of  several  well  "preserved" 
generations,  was  ordained  as  Mr.  Reed's  successor,  and  re- 
mained in  the  position  until  within  two  years  of  my  own 
departure  from  town  in  1848,  through  a  most  useful,  intel- 
ligent and  liberal  Christian  ministry  of  more  than  thirty 
years.  During  Mr.  Reed's  ministry  the  second  meeting- 
house was  built,  which,  to  my  youthful  eyes,  was  a  miracle 
of  ecclesiastical  architecture  ;  especially  on  its  first  lighting 
up  for  a  Christmas  service,  not  religious,  but  a  lecture  on 
Peace — a  dozen  tallow  candles  in  each  of  what  seemed  to 
me  its  countless  windows  and  a  small  forest  of  such  green 
things  as  could  be  obtained  or  imitated  within.  It  was  built 
in  1786  to  accommodate  the  entire  population,  with  forty 
pews  on  the  ground  floor,  galleries  around  three  sides  with 
pews  above  and  behind  them.  One  of  these  big,  square  pews 
was  appropriated  by  three  of  "  us  boys,"  in  the  northwest 
corner,  from  which  we  could  look  down  upon  the  minister's 
head,  or  across  into  the  faces  of  the  two  town  divinities  who 
sang  "  treble  and  counter"  in  the  choir,  or  do  anything  ex- 
cept make  enough  noise  to  be  "  called  to  order"  by  the 
parson.  A  huge  "sounding-board"  hung  suspended  over 
the  minister's  head  in  his  tall  pulpit,  with  its  two  rows  of 
seats  in  the  front,  where  the  deacons  and  the  town  authori- 
ties sat  facing  the  congregation.  It  was  not  until  I  was  old 
enough  to  carry  my  mother's  "  foot  stove"  to  church  that 
the  people  finally  consented  to  warm  the  inside.  In  my 
early  youth  this  was  the  only  church  in  town,  although 
there  were  already  two  or  three  organizations  of  Dissenters, 
only  about  half  the  people  then  belonging  to  the  Congre- 
gational Church,  which  in  creed  had  become  Unitarian  in 
faith,  though  with  no  change  in  organization  or  polity.  The 


21 

result  of  the  final  disruption  of  the  original  church  into  four 
"  societies,"  each  attempting  to  support  public  worship,  with 
a  steadily  declining  population,  is  well  known  to  all  of  you. 

The  noble  army  of  critics  who  still  picture  the  people  of 
the  New  England  of  that  day  as  the  slaves  of  a  narrow 
religious  creed,  living  under  the  tyranny  of  a  minister,  a  more 
complete  pope  than  the  venerable  head  of  the  Catholic 
Church  at  present,  in  the  vernacular  language  "get  the 
cart  before  the  horse."  The  difference  between  all  the 
European  and  the  American  churches  a  century  ago  was 
that,  over  there,  the  church  united  with  the  state  made  the 
organized  religion  for  the  people,  whereas,  here  the  people 
made  the  church.  Even  in  the  strict  days  of  the  Puritan 
regime,  which  only  lasted  until  the  accession  of  William 
and  Mary  to  the  throne  closed  the  era  of  religious  persecu- 
tion in  England,  the  people  made  the  church,  chose  their 
own  minister,  and  put  him  in  the  pulpit  "  during  good  be- 
havior." But  at  the  beginning  of  the  19th  century  the 
occasional  clerical  heresies  in  the  Congregational  Church 
culminated  in  the  group  of  ministers  which,  under  the 
leadership  of  Channing  was  finally  separated  into  what 
was  loosely  called  the  Unitarian,  but  was  really  a  body  of 
the  leading  churches  of  Massachusetts,  conducted  according 
to  the  original  Congregational  idea  of  the  absolute  independ- 
ence of  every  church,  tempered  by  the  liberty  of  "  advising," 
and  in  extreme  cases  leaving  a  congregation  to  "  work 
out  its  own  salvation."  For  more  than  twenty  years  of  mv 
youth  the  original  church,  with  perhaps  a  dozen  of  the  same 
sort  in  Central  and  Western  IVIassachusetts,  was  one  of  these, 
and  for  thirty  years  a  whole  generation  of  the  people  had 
been  educated  and  led  by  a  scholarly,  wise  and  devoted 
ministry  away  from  controversy. 

The  New  England  congregational  polity  was  the  only 
original  American  form  of  church  organization,  all  the 
others  being  adaptations  of  the  different  European  churches. 
In  the  four  or  five  different  religious  bodies  that  accepted  it 


99 


are  gathered  today  possibl}-  from  five  to  ten  thousand  con- 
gregations. It  is  the  only  polity  under  which  the  church 
can  adjust  its  creeds  and  organization  to  the  advancing 
Christian  civilization  of  the  years  without  violent  agitation, 
trials  for  heresy  and  painful  disruptions.  When  a  working 
majority  of  a  congregation  believes  in  "  expansion"  it 
simply  calls  a  minister  to  represent  its  faith.  At  the  period 
named,  certainly  for  fifteen  of  the  twenty-five  years,  this 
organization  consisted  of  what  was  called  "  church  and  con- 
gregation," the  congregation  practically  the  final  authority. 
The  large  majority  of  the  people  were  faithful  church- 
goers. They  came  on  Sunday  in  their  own  "  teams,"  "put 
them  up"  in  the  two  great  rows  of  horse  sheds  near  by,  and 
made  a  day  of  it  for  the  morning  and  afternoon  service, 
with  an  intermission  of  an  hour  occupied  by  the  Sunday 
school,  in  which  the  minister  still  preached  to  a  class  of 
"  grown  people"  in  the  basement  story,  while  the  majority  of 
women  visited  above  stairs  and  the  men  talked  on  the  piazza 
of  the  hotel  or  in  grandfather's  post  office.  It  was  all  through 
by  three  o'clock  P.  M.  and  the  people  went  home  to  their  Sun- 
day dinner.  Th^  singing  was  by  a  volunteer  choir,  which 
in  my  day  was  well  described  by  Peter  Parley's  charming 
story,  "A  Village  Choir."  The  singers  met  at  five  P.  M.  for 
a  Sunday  evening  singing  school.  Every  winter  good  old 
James  Ford,  from  Rowe,  appeared,  with  a  voice  like  the 
sound  of  the  North  wind,  to  "  keep  singing  school."  That 
was  all  there  was  of  church  services.  The  old-time  prayer 
meeting  had  been  given  up,  the  children  were  no  longer 
catechised,  and  the  minister,  still  "  settled  for  life,"  was  left 
to  the  liberty  of  becoming  what  he  really  was;  the  "first 
citizen,  the'man  of  all  work,"  educational,  spiritual,  philan- 
thropic, the  constant  visitor,  adviser  and  helper  of  his  peo- 
ple, "  starting"  the  boys  in  their  Latin,  himself  a  good 
scholar  and  one  of  the  best  schoolmen  in  the  region,  send- 
ing forth  a  family  that  made  its  mark  in  several  States.  It 
may  be  my  delusion  of  "  looking  backward,"  but  I  cannot 


23 

conceive  a  more  enviable  position  for  any  competent  man, 
gifted  with  the  spiritnal  tact  and  knowledge  of  hnman  na- 
tnre  that  is  half  of  religion,  wisel}^  facing  the  sunrise,  than 
was  occupied  at  that  day  by  the  first  generation  of  liberal 
Congregational  clergymen  in  Massachusetts.  They  did  not 
build  up  a  great  denomination  and  did  not  want  to.  But 
their  writings  and  their  preaching  inaugurated  a  movement 
that  is  now  mightily  at  work,  from  the  Catholic  to  the 
Christian  Science  sect,  and  which  in  some  blessed  day 
perhaps  may  once  more  give  us  a  Christian  people  mar- 
shaled in  one  grand  army  of  the  Lord  for  a  final  campaign 
against  the  lower  side  of  American  society  to  establish  that 
kingdom  of  God  which  is  not  a  church,  but  a  civilization, 
founded  on  the  sermon  on  the  mount,  the  beatitudes,  the 
Lord's  prayer  and  the  law  of  love  to  God  and  man. 

5th.  Next  in  importance  as  one  of  the  vital  elements  of 
the  old-time  New  England  life  was  the  school.  Warwick 
was  not  one  of  the  towns  favored  by  an  academy,  and  only 
occasionally  with  a  private  school,  although  the  minister 
and  the  new  doctor  were  always  ready  to  help  out  an  ambi- 
tious boy  or  girl  in  their  studies  and  give  advice  in  good 
reading.  The  town  was  divided  into  ten  school  districts, 
and  as  the  entire  school  population,  including  the  big  boys 
in  winter,  was  scarcely  more  than  two  hundred,  several  of 
these  schools  were  very  small,  although  in  my  day  each  was 
favored  by  a  "  master."  In  the  autumn  what  was  called  "  a 
fall  school,"  a  private  tuition  arrangement,  was  usually  kept 
up,  in  which  high-school  studies  were  introduced,  generally 
taught  by  a  college  graduate. 

But  the  New  England  common  school  of  that  period  was 
simply  the  center  of  a  group  of  agencies  backed  by  a  public 
opinion  and  habit  which  really  made  each  of  the  350  IMassa- 
chusetts  towns  of  seventy  years  ago  one  of  the  best  possible 
universities  for  the  training  of  a  Republican  citizenship, 
within  a  short  generation  to  be  tested  in  thegreat  Civil  War 
for  the  preservation  of  the  Union. 


24 

One  of  the  orignal  conditions  of  the  settlement  of  the  six 
miles  square  of  mountain  wilderness  that  became  Warwick 
was  a  provision  that  one  of  the  sixty-three  equal  shares  of 
land  should  be  reserved  for  the  support  of  schools.  Imme- 
diately after  the  town  had  supplied  itself  with  the  regula- 
tion three  "  necessaries  of  life,"  spiritual  and  material,  a 
meeting-house,  a  saw  mill  and  a  grist  mill,  it  made  haste  to 
vote  ;^io  for  the  support  of  a  school.  During  the  more 
than  twenty  years  previous  the  children  were  doubtless  in- 
structed at  home  or  by  the  minister.  The  American  com- 
mon school,  established  by  law  in  the  Massachusetts  colony 
in  1647,  declared  by  Horace  Mann  "  the  most  import- 
ant new  departure  in  human  affairs  since  the  founding  of 
Christianity,"  was  the  first  permanent  attempt  of  the  whole 
people  to  educate  all  the  children  by  public  taxation  through 
the  ordinary  local,  municipal  and  State  agencies  of  a  free 
government.  The  colonists  of  Massachusetts,  as  a  body, 
were  more  competent  to  school  their  own  children  than 
probably  any  previous  settlement  representing  all  orders  of 
society.  But  it  was  soon  found  that  the  school  required  a 
separate  organization,  and  by  the  time  Warwick  became  a 
town  the  district  system  of  schooling  had  become  common 
through  all  the  settled  parts  of  New  England  save  in  Rhode 
Island.  In  Warwick  the  school  began  in  1768,  from  the 
first  co-educational,  the  earliest  kept  by  a  woman,  notwith- 
standing the  provision  that  the  winter  term  should  be  under 
a  master.  But  it  was  provided  that  "  if  the  major  part  of 
the  quarter  where  she  lived  objected  against  her  keeping 
school  the  town  should  dismiss  her."  She  received  four 
and  sixpence  a  week  for  teaching,  her  father  "  throwing  in" 
the  board.  The  appropriations  for  schools  increased  in  ten 
years  to  twice  that  sum,  and  in  1785  the  town  was  divided 
into  the  ten  school  districts  that  remained  during  the  twen- 
ty-five years  of  my  own  Warwick  life. 

I  was  employed  to  teach  in  three  of  these  districts,  one 
the  "  center",  the  school  term  lasting  two  and  three  months. 


25 

at  wages  of  twelve,  fifteen  and  twenty  dollars  a  month,  one 
winter  "boarding  round"  and  on  the  last  living  at  home. 
'My  mother  had  been  a  school  mistress  and  both  my  sisters 
"  followed  suit."  Indeed  it  was  the  "  eminently  respectable" 
thing  for  every  competent  young  person  to  "keep  school." 
The  late  Bishop  F.  D.  Huntington,  on  graduating  and  as 
a  divinity  student,  was  twice  the  master  of  our  "fall 
school."  He  insisted  that  every  boy  in  his  upper  class 
should  teach  during  the  coming  winter.  We  all  succeeded  in 
getting  employment  except  one,  who,  after  long  waiting,  was 
hired;  although  he  reported  that  he  "differed  a  good  deal 
from  the  committee  when  examined  in  arithmetic  and 
grammar."  Horace  ]\Iann  said  "  up  to  our  time  almost 
every  distinguished  public  man  in  New  England  has  been 
a  school  master ;"  and  Daniel  Webster  said,  "  If  I  had  as 
many  boys  as  old  King  Priam,  I  w'ould  send  them  all  to  the 
country  district  school." 

As  usual,  the  critics  of  that  period  make  the  same  blunder 
in  their  estimate  of  the  old-time  country  district  school  as 
in  their  talk  about  the  church  of  the  New  England  of  seventy 
years  ago.  Of  course,  tried  by  the  strict  laws  of  the  organ- 
ization, methods  of  study  and  discipline  and  sanitary  ar- 
rangements of  the  "  New  Education,"  the  old  schools  were 
"  more  or  less" — sometimes  a  good  deal  "  more" — defective. 
But  their  one  superiority  in  which  they  surpassed  the  pres- 
ent system  was  that  they  were  essentially  a  vital  part  of  the 
people.  The  whole  town  of  Warwick  "  kept  school,"  at 
least  six  months  in  the  year  through  the  country  district 
school,  and  during  the  remaining  six  months  "  took  mat- 
ters into  its  own  hands."  Mr.  Emerson  wrote  to  his  daugh- 
ter at  a  boarding  school :  "  Find  out  the  best  teacher  and 
study  what  he  teaches."  During  my  youth,  in  two  im- 
portant towns  where  I  officiated  as  schoolmaster,  the  schools 
were  taught  in  winter  by  young  men  who,  with  scarcely  an 
exception,  afterward  became  noted  and  often  distinguished, 
in  several  cases  of  national  reputation.     They  were  often 


26 

college  students,  and  generally  the  boys  engaged  in  what 
was  then  often  a  peril  to  life  and  health,  "  getting  an  educa- 
tion." The  summer  schools  were  "  kept"  by  the  daughters 
of  the  ministers,  the  doctors  and  the  leading  families,  who 
afterwards  became  the  foremost  women  in  their  communi- 
ties. Each  of  these  was  a  "  bright  and  shining  light"  to 
the  little  group  of  children  and  youth,  encouraging  and 
often  helping  in  private  the  more  ambitious,  and  even  wak- 
ing lip  the  dunces  and  arresting  the  mischief  makers.  The 
coming  to  a  town  of  a  thousand  people,  practically  isolated 
from  the  world  in  winter,  of  half  a  dozen  young  men  of  this 
sort  was  a  Godsend.  They  were  taken  on  trust  into  the 
best  society,  and  not  unfrequently  found  that  winter  their 
"  better  half  "  for  life. 

In  addition  to  this,  in  my  own  town,  in  two  or  three  pub- 
lic and  as  many  private  libraries,  there  were  probably  500 
books  accessible  to  every  boy  and  girl,  like  "  Harper's 
Family  Library,"  "  Sparks'  American  Biography,"  the 
novels  of  Miss  Sedgwick,  Cooper,  Scott,  and,  unhappily, 
the  ghost  novels,  "  The  Three  Spaniards,"  "Alonzo 
and  Melissa,"  and  "  The  Horrors  of  Oakendale  Abbey," 
which,  as  I  now  read  their  names,  send  the  cold  shivers 
down  my  spine.  Later  came  the  first  copy  of  Shakspeare, 
which  our  champion  young  woman,  who  braided  hats  before 
a  book-rack,  read  through  in  a  week,  saying  :  "  They  are 
the  prettiest  stories  I  ever  read."  After  several  unexpected 
fights  among  the  boys,  fired  up  by  the  battles  of  the  drama- 
tist, an  eminently  respectable  old  gentleman  volunteered 
the  statement :  "  This  Shakspeare  makes  our  boys  sassy, 
and  we  must  put  him  down."  I  am  old-fashioned  enough 
to  believe  that  the  reading  I  did  there  before,  at  the  age  of 
seventeen,  I  ever  saw  a  large  library,  perhaps  covering  two 
or  three  hundred  volumes,  was  better  than  that  of  the  city 
school  boy  of  today,  who  faces  a  million  volumes  and  a  regi- 
ment of  advisers  concerning  what  not  to  read,  too  often 


27 

compromising  on  the  sensational  newspapers,  magazines  and 
picture  papers  illnstrated  by  reading. 

Then  the  winter  lyceum,  which  met  in  the  Center  school 
house  every  week,  where  the  women  brought  their  knitting 
work  and  the  best  men  in  town  wrestled  mightily  in  debate 
over  questions  like  "Temperance,"  "Capital  Punishment," 
''Education,"  "  Nullification,"  "  The  Annexation  of  Texas," 
indeed,  everything  that  could  interest  the  boundless  curi- 
osity of  such  a  people  ;  the  debate,  prefaced  often  by  a  half- 
hour  free  lecture  from  some  visiting  dignitary ;  was  a  train- 
ing school  of  all  others  adapted  to  the  condition  of  the 
country.  Of  course,  "  we  boys"  were  there,  crowding  the 
front  seats,  always  wide  awake  when  Squire  Blake  put  on 
his  glasses  to  hold  forth  in  poetry  or  prose,  or  welcome  the 
town's  bright  woman  appearing  in  one  of  her  sharp  and 
breezy  comments  on  home  affairs  in  the  lyceum  paper. 

The  circulation  of  the  press  was  limited  to  two  Boston 
weeklies,  now  represented  by  the  "Advertiser"  and  "  Jour- 
nal," the  county  weekly  and  "  The  Youth's  Companion"  in 
its  early  youth.  At  the  age  of  from  ten  to  fifteen  ni}-  polit- 
ical training  began  by  being  perched  on  grandfather's  post- 
office  counter  on  Friday  nights  when  the  Boston  mail  came 
in,  to  read  the  speeches  of  Webster,  Calhoun,  Hayne,  Ben- 
ton and  Henry  Clay,  with  the  famous  interview  of  Old 
Hickory,  ending,  "  By  the  Eternal  things  shall  go  right." 

But  all  this,  including  the  schools  and  the  minister's 
sermons,  was  only  an  accumulation  of  material  for  the  end- 
less talk  that  went  on  everywhere — between  the  mothers 
rocking  the  cradle,  in  the  shoemaker's  shop,  at  intermission 
on  Sunday,  and  especially  in  the  village  store,  where  I 
studied  human  nature,  stretched  at  length  upon  the  counter, 
with  my  head  resting  upon  a  pile  of  cotton  cloth,  through 
a  cloud  of  tobacco  smoke  listening  to  the  great  talk  that 
raged  up  and  down  before  the  big  fireplace  until  far  into 
the  winter  night.  Once,  at  a  club,  discussing  the  different 
means  of    human   culture,  Daniel  Webster  growled  out : 


28 

"Gentlemen,  you  have  left  out  the  most  important  univer- 
sity, conversation,"  American  civilization,  the  World's 
Republic  as  we  call  it  now,  was  talked  into  shape  through 
250  years  of  what  was  going  on  in  Warwick  in  my  day. 

The  one  drawback  in  the  schools  was  the  half-barbaric 
discipline.  Every  master  was  "  put  to  his  trumps"  to  govern 
the  group  of  big  boys  who  gave  their  last  winter  before  21 
at  school,  often  with  the  double  purpose  of  learning  a  little 
more  arithmetic  and  having  their  own  way  if  they  could. 
The  good  old  way  of  thrashing,  brought  over  from  England, 
\vas  in  full  blast.  Now  and  then  a  master  that  couldn't 
keep  on  his  feet  was  bodily  put  out  of  school  or  dismissed 
as  incompetent.  Then  one  of  two  pedagogic  bullies,  whose 
winters  were  spent  in  "  keeping  out"  schools,  was  called  to 
fill  the  breach.  He  generally  began  by  taking  some  oppor- 
tunity to  thrash  every  boy  and  girl  with  the  regulation 
ferule  ;  in  case  of  any  resentment  from  the  victim,  handling 
him  or  her  in  a  way  that  would  bring  a  policeman  to  the 
rescue  in  any  community  in  Massachusetts  today.  I  was 
happily  saved  from  this  impending  fate,  in  my  first  winter's 
school-keeping,  of  being  put  out  of  the  school-house — as  w^as 
threatened  by  five  big  boys,  each  more  than  a  match  for 
their  sixteen-year  old  master,  "small  of  his  age" — by  the 
advice  of  good  Aunt  Annie,  before  mentioned,  sitting  in 
one  corner  of  the  fire-place,  in  spectacles  and  matchless 
white  apron,  I,  already  "shaking  in  my  shoes,"  in  the 
other.  She  discoursed  deep  wisdom :  "I  know  all  them 
folks.  I've  nussed  in  every  family  in  that  deestrict.  You've 
got  five  big  boys  there  that  say  they're  going  to  put 
you  out  doors.  But  I've  come  home  tonight  to  tell  you 
what  to  do.  There  are  ten  great  gals  in  that  school,  and 
they're  good  gals,  too.  They  say  they  are  not  going  to 
have  any  such  works  as  them  boys  want.  Now  you  gain 
the  affections  of  them  ten  gals  and  they'll  take  care  of  them 
five  big  boys,  and  your  school  will  go  just  like  sliden  down 
hill."     On  that  hint  I  acted.     Four  of  mv  enemies  were 


29 

captured  ;  the  fifth  by  the  help  of  the  Lord,  I  thrashed,  and, 
after  a  second  thrashing  from  his  father,  he  came  back  "  an 
exemplary  young  man."  It  was  no  merit  of  mine.  What 
couldn't  any  half-scared  sixteen-year-old  boy  do,  backed  by 
ten  great  gals  of  Warwick  ?  That  taught  me  the  secret  of 
all  government  in  school,  in  family,  in  the  State.  Get  the 
best  ten  gals  or  boys,  men  or  women  on  your  side — the  Lord 
compromised  on  ten  in  the  Sodom  case — and  then  trust  in 
Providence  and  be  ready  to  fight  when  the  brush  comes. 

6.  All  that  I  have  now  said  had  its  most  decisive  outcome 
in  the  political  life  of  the  town.  We  hear  a  good  deal  about 
the  study  of  "  Civics"  in  our  higher  schools  and  colleges, 
and  there  is  no  danger  that  American  youth  will  know  too 
well  the  history  of  their  country,  the  organization  of  the 
government  and  especially  the  art  of  reading  the  political 
newspapers  with  profit.  The  ten  most  receptive  years  of 
my  Warwick  residence,  from  twelve  to  twenty-two,  were 
passed  in  a  time  of  great  political  agitation  ;  the  first  de- 
monstration of  "  Nullification"  by  the  South,  with  the  great 
debates  in  Congress  ;  the  administration  of  General  Andrew 
Jackson  and  his  successors,  involving  the  decision  of  the 
important  financial  questions  later  on.  The  beginning  of 
the  anti-slavery  and  temperance  agitation  was  dividing  the 
voters.  Happily,  the  long  period  of  at  least  outward  con- 
sent to  worship  God  together  in  one  church  had  practically 
banished  religious  intolerance.  So  the  "  spoiling  for  a  fight" 
that  is  the  chronic  condition  of  an  Anglo-Saxon  community 
where,  as  in  the  New  England  of  that  day,  the  natural 
weapons  were  the  only  armory  of  exasperated  manhood, 
showed  itself  in  the  town  politics.  And  as  the  one  hundred 
voters,  more  or  less,  of  the  place  were  divided  almost  equally 
between  the  two  parties,  whig  and  democrat,  there  was 
abundant  opportunity  for  lively  times  on  the  approach  of 
election  day,  especially  as  there  were  two  or  three  of  them 
every  year.  The  love  of  litigation  was  also  kept  alive  by 
certain  people  who  supplied  the  town  with  entertainment 


30 

by  the  frequent  trials  before  the  justice  of  the  peace,  in  the 
tavern  hall,  liberally  re-enforced  by  libations  from  the  bar 
below.  I  have  listened  for  days  to  the  pleadings  of  young 
country  lawyers,  who  afterwards  reached  the  highest  honors 
of  their  profession  in  different  States,  in  trials  involving  the 
rights  of  the  different  dogs  in  a  neighborhood  and  matters 
incredibly  small,  but  all  acting  as  a  vent  for  the  intense  energy 
stored  up  as  in  a  mighty  receiver  in  one  of  those  isolated 
townships.  Governor  N.  P.  Banks  used  to  say  :  "  One  time 
you'd  visit  a  Yankee  town  and  find  the  people  in  constant 
friction  over  two  or  three  ambitious  leaders  whose  perpetual 
quarrels  gave  no  peace  to  the  community.  Ten  years  later 
you'd  go  back  and  find  a  new  factory  village  with  two  or 
three  mills,  each  of  these  quarrelsome  men  a  superintendent 
of  one,  and  the  town  in  perfect  harmony."  It  was  the  vent, 
the  opportunity  to  use  the  prodigious  amount  of  ability 
stored  up  in  these  little  republics,  that  finally  set  adrift  the 
young  men  and  women  who  became  the  makers  of  States, 
and,  later,  in  the  building  up  of  manufactures  and  the  growth 
of  large  villages  to  cities  created  the  new  grouping  of  society 
amid  which  we  live  today. 

7.  It  must  not  be  inferred  from  this  prodigious  develop- 
ment of  earnestness  and  the  often  stern,  serious  and  reserved 
aspect  of  society,  that  a  New  England  town  seventy  to  sev- 
enty-five years  ago  was  what  might  be  inferred  from  the 
caricatures  that  often  appear  in  the  novels  and  romances 
that  attempt  to  deal  with  this  period.  Of  course,  every 
town  had  its  due  proportion  of  cranks,  melancholies,  people 
who  lived  by  themselves ;  and  in  some  of  them  every  ap- 
pearance of  undue  gaiety  was  regarded  by  the  church  and 
clergy  as  the  last  development  of  Satan,  But  no  people  on 
earth  has  been  more  richly  endowed  with  "  mother  wit" 
and  an  intense  love  of  fun  for  its  own  sake  than  the  New 
England  people  of  that  day.  And  the  more  it  was  sup- 
pressed outwardly,  the  more  it  pervaded  all  classes  and 
showed  itself,  like  the  electric  spark,  wherever  two  fun- 


31 

loving  souls  furnished  the  positive  and  negative  conditions. 
And  as  every  great  European  court  in  the  middle  age  had 
its  professional  jester,  generally  the  brightest  man  of  all, 
licensed  to  say  everything  that  nobody  else  dared  to  breathe, 
so  every  New  England  town  was  furnished  with  one  char- 
acter, a  "  Sam  Lawson,"  or  otherwise,  whose  pranks  saved 
the  people  from  despair  on  anything,  even  their  own  salva- 
tion. 

The  man  of  all  others  who  "  kept  things  going"  in  War- 
wick, in  my  youth,  under  proper  training,  might  have  made 
another  Artemus  Ward  or  ]\Iark  Twain.  x\s  it  was,  his 
genius  blazed  out  in  a  comical  way  he  had  of  giving  to 
every  person  in  town  a  queer  nick-name,  which  fitted  so 
close  that,  once  tried  on,  it  was  as  easy  to  get  along  without 
your  skin  as  to  dodge  it.  He  appropriated  to  himself  the  res- 
pectable name,  "  Mr.  Chase",  and  honored  his  partner  in  life, 
as  "  Lady  Washington."  The  goings  on  of  this  town  wit  were 
a  constant  entertainment  to  the  community,  and  the  sparkles 
of  not  bad-humored  witticism  that  came  from  "Mr.  Chase" 
became  for  several  years  a  positive  element  in  the  schooling 
of  the  boys  and  girls.  After  his  day  came  up  from  Boston 
town  a  man,  with  his  admirable  wife,  so  wise,  kind  and  ap- 
preciative, with  such  a  fund  of  delightful  humor  that  would 
have  made  him  a  bosom  friend  of  Charles  Lamb,  ready  to 
turn  everything  that  approached  a  dismal  crisis  on  its  com- 
ical side,  without  children,  but  the  dear  "uncle"  of  every 
boy  or  girl  that  needed  help  outside  the  home,  that  I 
verily  believe  his  ministry  of  cheerfulness  was  for  years 
the  best  of  all  the  ministries  in  the  town,  already  distracted 
by  the  attempt  to  "  dispense  the  gospel"  from  four  pulpits 
instead  of  one. 

The  "  conclusion  of  the  whole  matter"  is  that,  during 
the  hundred  years  between  the  incorporation  of  War- 
wick and  the  decade  before  the  outbreak  of  the  civil  war, 
a  New  England  town  like  Warwick — and  there  were  many 
such — was  a  concentrated  and  isolated  universitv  for  train- 


32 

ing  half  a  dozen  generations  of  as  able,  effective  and  truly 
superior  people  as  ever  took  a  hand  in  the  making  of  a  na- 
tion. But,  of  course,  this  tremendous  concentration  and 
development  of  local  ability  had  its  shadow-side  in  an  exag- 
gerated sense  of  personal  "  independence",  an  obstinate 
provincialism  and  the  lack  of  appreciation  of  a  cosmopolitan 
order  of  society,  which  sometimes  put  these  New  England 
States  in  political  policy  in  opposition  to  the  growth  of  the 
Republic.  Within  the  past  fifty  years  we  have  been  pretty 
thoroughly  disciplined  out  of  our  conceit  of  an  exclusive 
Anglo-Saxon  civilization,  by  the  prodigious  invasion  from 
abroad  in  our  own  State  and  the  spectacle  of  the  magnifi- 
cent development  of  the  commonwealths  beyond  the  Berk- 
shire Hills  that,  from  the  first,  adopted  the  policy  of 
making  "Native  Americans"  out  of  "all  sorts  and  condi- 
tions" of  people  in  the  round  world. 

The  change  from  this  old  order  began  in  my  youth,  with 
the  establishment  of  a  "  factory  village"  in  many  of  the 
hill  towns  around  a  "  water  power"  in  a  valley,  which  soon 
outgrew  the  original  town  and  in  time  became  what  every- 
where out  of  New  England  is  called  a  city,  with  the  later 
building  up  of  great  manufacturing  centers  with  twice  the 
sixty-two  thousand  people  of  the  Boston  of  seventy  years 
ago.  It  was  inevitable  that  the  New  England  town  of  that 
day  finally  was  to  become  a  city  or  flourishing  village,  or 
one  of  a  group  of  suburban  towns  adjacent  to  such  a  center. 
The  emphasis  of  life  today  in  New  England  is  on  its  urban 
side.  The  marvelous  improvement  in  transportation  has 
now  practically  placed  every  Massachusetts  farmer  within 
an  hour's  ride  or  ten  minutes'  communication  with  a  flour- 
ishing village  or  city  of  from  three  to  a  hundred  thousand 
people  and  made  ever}-  considerable  village  practically  one 
of  the  wards  of  the  nearest  city. 

Perhaps  we  shall  better  realize  this  startling  fact  by  a 
glance  at  what  has  happened  in  and  around  our  beloved 


33 

town,  Warwick,  since  the  day  of  which  I  am  writing,  from 
1825  to  1850. 

Warwick  was  then  one  of  nine  towns,  only  fonr  of  which 
had  a  larger  population  than  its  1,150,  the  group  ranging 
from  488  to  1,889.  This  entire  region  of  thirty  miles  square 
was  a  farming  country,  watered  by  two  rivers  and  numerous 
brooks  and  ponds  ;  outside  the  meadow  land  and  valleys  a 
tumble  of  high  hills  with  our  Mt.  Grace  the  summit,  1,600 
feet  high,  and  our  "  upper  village"  1,000  feet  above  the  sea. 
There  were  less  than  10,000  people  in  the  entire  region, 
probably  not  500  of  foreign  birth.  I  have  described  the 
opportunities  of  the  youth  in  the  church  and  school,  includ- 
ing two  academits,  and  given  a  general  impression  of  the 
way  the  people  lived,  with  very  little  absolute  poverty  and 
a  sprinkling  of  men  who  could  boast  the  old-time  estimate 
of  wealth  :  "  He's  worth  $40,000." 

Several  of  these  towns,  including  our  own,  have  declined 
in  population  and  importance  with  their  share  of  "  aban- 
doned farms"  and  apparently  no  immediate  prospect  of  re- 
cuperation. But  in  1900,  there  was  in  this  thirty  miles 
square  a  population  of  more  than  25,000.  Two  little  ham- 
lets of  my  youth  are  now  flourishing  villages  of  7,000 
and  9,000  people,  with  practically  all  the  advantages  of  city 
life,  furnishing  three  millions  and  four  millions  of  the  entire 
tax  valuation  of  the  nine  towns,  eleven  million,  five  hun- 
dred thousand  dollars.  It  is  easier  today  to  reach  either  of 
these  centers  from  Warwick  village  than  to  visit  half  the 
Warwick  farmers  of  seventy  years  ago  from  the  old  meeting- 
house. There  is  now  a  market  for  every  man  who  can  put 
his  brains  into  his  hands  in  furnishing  supplies  for  what  is 
possibly  a  population  of  thirty  thousand  people.  By  the 
great  change  in  church  affairs — leaving  out  Northfield,  now 
a  National  educational  religious  center — a  score  of  these 
churches  have  become  each  a  group  of  institutions,  with 
arrangements  for  social,  educational,  charitable  and  mis- 
sionary enterprize  never  dreamed  of  before.     Every  one  of 


34 

the  5,000  school  children  in  these  towns  is  now  entitled  to 
a  free  high-school  education,  superior  to  the  old  academy, 
and  the  public  school  property  of  the  region  is  probably  in 
the  neighborhood  of  half  a  million  dollars,  without  estimat- 
ing the  Moody  seminaries.  There  are  fifty  thousand  volumes 
in  the  public  libraries,  and  every  family  may  be  reached  by 
a  daily  newspaper  of  the  first  class.  In  my  grandfather 
Cobb's  diary,  I  find  a  record  of  the  battles  of  the  wars  of 
Napoleon,  often  months  after  their  occurrence  ;  while  today 
it  is  easier  for  any  inhabitant  of  this  village  to  know  what 
was  going  on  yesterday  in  the  Japanese  and  Russian  contest 
than  in  my  youth  to  hear  of  the  last  boy  drowned  in  the 
Connecticut  River,  in  Northfield,  or  the  man  who  had  broken 
his  leg  in  Orange.  The  method  of  trading  in  the  dozen  or 
more  country  stores  in  the  old  day  "  failed"  all  but  a  very 
few  of  the  more  enterprizing  "  store  keepers"  and  left  many 
people  finally  restless  and  uncertain,  with  little  to  look  for- 
ward to  after  a  life  of  half  a  century  of  toil. 

One  of  the  results  of  the  rapid-transit  system  of  travel  is 
now  a  reversion  to  the  good  old  British  idea  of  every  well- 
to-do  family  having  a  country  or  suburban  home,  away  from 
the  terrible  rush  and  roar  even  of  a  manufacturing  village 
of  5,000  people.  I  am  not  here  to  advise  the  farmers  of 
Warwick  what  to  do  with  their  lands.  But  after  an  obser- 
vation of  every  part  of  our  country  east  of  the  great  conti- 
nental mountain  range  that  overlooks  the  Pacific  realm,  I 
am  here  to  say  that  I  know  of  no  six  miles  square  that,  with 
proper  investment  and  good  management,  would  furnish 
a  greater  number  of  sites  for  charming  summer  homes, 
with  a  more  healthful  climate  and  attractive  scenery,  both 
for  city  visitors  and  people  from  the  crowded  commu- 
nities in  the  valleys  that  are  invited  to  "  lift  up  their  eyes 
unto  the  hills"  of  Warwick  and  find  there  the  "  strength" 
that  comes  from  a  quiet  interval  in  the  mad  rush  of  the 
tremendous  days  in  which  we  live.  And  if  this  picture  of 
the  twenty-five  years  in  old  Warwick  which  I  have  been 


35 

living  over  again  during  my  week  of  preparation  for  this 
occasion  and  the  prophecy  of  what  may  to  our  children 
present  a  new  Warwick  even  more  attractive  of  its  sort  than 
the  old,  shall  set  anybody  in  my  hearing  to  thinking  on  the 
possibilities  of  the  dear  old  home  lot,  I  shall  thank  the 
good  Providence  that  in  promoting  me  to  the  Warwick 
aristocracy  of  eighty  years  has  kept  me  alive  once  more  to 
behold  your  faces  and  listen  once  more  to  the  echo  of  be- 
loved old  voices  on  this  most  glorious  of  old  Warwick  sum- 
mer days. 


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